I'll be following Bobby Ghosh up this particular hill:
But on one small matter of punctuation, a strange consensus has pursued me from city to city, editor to editor, byline to byline. The em-dash — that elegant horizontal stripe which hinges one clause to another — is unseemly. Real writers don’t use ‘em, I’ve been told a hundred times. Real writers use commas. Real writers trust the reader.
Well, real writers can go pound sand. I have spent forty years ignoring this advice, and I do not propose to stop now. Which is inconvenient, because a new antagonist has arrived, armed with better lawyers than any copy chief ever had: artificial intelligence.
Friends, Romans, Copy Editors — Lend Me Your Em-Dashesbobbyghosh.substack.comI come to defend two of my favorite literary devices from the evil that LLMs do.